Codepreview
On-demand testing environments in a few hours without docker
Hi IndieHackers,
While working on my last product, I wanted to get a landing page ASAP, the main goal was getting it done fast instead of making it perfect.
While my current page has many details to be improved, I consider that the outcome was super good given the time I spent into it.
So, the time was spent like this:
- 1h looking for website templates until I selected one I felt comfortable with.
- 1h spent on preparing a mini demo video (I know, too much time for a 1 minute video).
- 1h30m spent on figuring out and updating the template content with the one related to my product.
- 30m preparing a logo and uploading the webpage to a web server.
It is worth sharing that I'm an engineer who has worked on backend/frontend/infrastructure, while my design skills suck, I can easily code pages. All of this helped me to not spend time figuring out how to release the webpage or how to change it. Still, I feel that this approach can be used with no-code website tools.
Since then, I have easily spent another 4h on the website just to do some SEO optimization, for example:
- I made a big mistake while selecting the template, I picked the React-based app, which caused my app to not get indexed by search engines for ~1 month! At the end, I put another hour just to migrate my website to a static html page (gladly, the template I purchased had this option too) which fixed the issue.
- Due to the search engine indexing issue, I had to figure out how to deal with Bing/Google webmaster tools + applying many optimizations suggested by bots (checkbot, ahrefs, lighthouse).
I'm sharing this is to hopefully motivate others to not get discouraged from building your landing page. If you are not an engineer (there are webflow templates, even domain sellers have templates/hosting). If you are an engineer but suck at design, there are cheap templates. If you are skilled at frontend/design, you can likely do it better but a template can likely get your landing page done faster (re-do it when you get customers).
At last, my product isn't very descriptive for everyone but it has proven to be helpful when I do calls with potential customers, I just screen share to showcase the website and narrate the demo video hosted on the landing page.
You can do it too!
15 Comments
It looks impressive you have done much works in limited work... logo, template selection, customization, and much more!
Happy to see you have solved the problems you faced in short time. By the way best of luck for your work.
That's so great that now one can build landing pages very quickly using no-code tools. Last time I used Super.so and even got featured on their page. Why don't you use one of those?
While I tried a few no-code tools to launch this landing page, it is hard to left being in control when you know how to code, previously, I worked with a customer that used Webflow and I found myself spending more time on changes than what I'd require to update the code.
On the other hand, super.so looks very interesting.
I'm a designer + web developer so this might not be as easy for some, but!
My favorite way to quick launch a product:
I can launch a product in under an hour using that (and I did the other day -> https://solipsismwow.com/).
That's a nice one!
Zoho mail works fine and charges $1/month.
Do you get cloud storage with Zoho? Google's lowest tier plan gets you 6TB per user. That's a big plus for us as we send a lot of large attachments.
I think the subscription includes something like Drive but I don't use it. If you know the attachment size, I'd just check Zoho's pricing to see what it includes.
I really enjoy using Vercel.com, because the UI looks nice :D
but still buy on godaddy.com :(
Wow, you are cool, man! But you wrote about preparing logo, what does it mean ?
I have always struggled to choose a logo for my apps (one time, it took me almost two years without a logo).
Basically, I spent the most efficient 15 minutes on getting an idea and preparing this image: https://codepreview.io/images/logo.png
Interesting for sure, but a couple more species might be additionally interesting?
I used Google/Github/IndieHackers/HackerNews (found cruip from hn).
Still, this depends on your background, I have a non-technical friend who was able to get a landing page live in a few hours by purchasing a template from GoDaddy (where he purchased the domain).
Similarly, depends on your background, I already run many cloud servers with nginx where I can launch a new page in minutes.
For people using JavaScript, there is Vercel and many tools.
For non-technical people, websites selling templates commonly offer hosting solutions.
Can you recommend a source for good templates?
This is one of those topics where everyone has its own taste, I liked some templates from https://cruip.com, having many flavors was helpful when I migrated from React to a static html version.
This page has overall topics and I got some inspiration from this page. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/free-landing-page-templates